The Last Ranger #10: Is This The End?, by Craig Sargent
January, 1989 Popular Library
Well, I just finished Doomsday Warrior, so it’s only fitting that I’m also now finishing The Last Ranger, a sort-of sister series to that earlier (and longer-running) post-nuke pulp, at least in how The Last Ranger was written by Jan Stacy, who co-wrote the earliest volumes of Doomsday Warrior with Ryder Syvertsen.
As I mentioned many years ago in my review of the first volume, I was a fan of The Last Ranger from the beginning, and not just because – for once! – I got in on the ground floor, having bought the first volume soon after it was published in 1986. No, I was also drawn to the entire setup, of a young man trying to survive in a violent, hellish post-nuke world, driving around on an armored Harley with his faithful pit bull at his back. To this day I still remember so excitedly talking to a fellow young fan of the series in the WaldenBooks store in the Valley View Mall, in 1987, when the fifth volume was published.
I wonder how long that kid stuck with the series; I believe the fifth volume was the last one I purchased new, and it wasn’t until shortly after I started this blog in 2010 that I decided to go out and pick up all the volumes of the series. Reading it as an “adult,” I can’t say The Last Ranger floated my boat like it once did…but then, that’s really only true for the final installments of the series. It would seem that Jan Stacy lost interest in the series soon after I did, as volumes 6 through 9 weren’t very good, and seemed quickly turned out.
But then (again), this could be because Jan Stacy had other things on his mind; as we know, Stacy passed away in 1989, from AIDS. As I also mentioned in my review of the first volume, this really brings a “hmmm” element to the nihilistic final volume of The Last Ranger; spoiler warning and etc, but the answer to the title, “Is This The End?,” is most certainly yes. I mean, the entire planet blows up – it doesn’t get much more “the end” than that.
As with those most recent volumes, Stacy here is more focused on sadism and ghoulish spectacle, again bringing a “hmmm” reading to the books. No exaggeration, a good portion of Is This The End? is devoted to the excessive detailing of post-nuke horrors, horrifically mutated humans and the equally-horrific tortures they put others through. There is a definite nihilistic bent to the book, and not just due to the finale; this is the work of an author who has become sick of life in general and the human race in particular – it is an excessively dark work, with little in the way of the goofy humor that leavened the darkness of earlier books. It’s almost as if hope had run out in Jan Stacy’s own life, and he brought that into his fiction.
We’re well beyond the opening gimmick of “a young man on his Harley with his pet dog” of the earliest books; indeed, the dog, Excaliber (and yes, it’s spelled with an “er” instead of a “ur”), is insensate for the majority of the book, in a coma derived from injuries in the previous volume, and thus there is none of the goofy bantering between dog and young man in this one.
As for the young man, Martin Stone, he spends the majority of this final volume being captured by one group or another. Also, I’ll note here for posterity than in this last one Stone does not make a return trip to his mountain-side nuclear bunker retreat; for whatever reasons, those parts were always my favorite when I read these books as a kid. Back then – and even now – I wondered why Stone didn’t just find himself a girl and go live in that place forever. If he had, the world might have survived, but more on that in a bit.
As with most other volumes, Is This The End? opens directly after the events of the previous volume – indeed, it’s a mere two days later. Excaliber is injured and near death, in a coma that he won’t wake from until nearly the end of the book. Stone is on his new bike and he’s trying to get to Texas, where series villain the Dwarf, an armless and legless sadist who basically controls the world, has taken Stone’s perennially-abducted sister, April.
Jan Stacy fills pages with abandon; despite being only 168 pages, Is This The End? is a trying read, mostly because Stacy doesn’t really have a plot to hang the sadism on. There is a lot of stalling and repetition; the first quarter of the book has Stone enduring a freak thunderstorm, after which he eventually hooks up with a hotstuff biker chick named Rasberry Thorn, saving her from rival bikers.
Rasberry takes Stone back to her headquarters, where it turns out she runs The Ballbusters, an all-female biker gang that’s in a constant state of internal warfare. Rasberry casually remarks that Stone must be her prisoner: no men are allowed in the camp, except prisoners who are there for to satisfy the sexual needs of the biker women, after which they’re killed. Stacy is unlike Ryder Syvertsen in that he has not removed the graphic element from his books, thus the Stone-Rasberry conjugation leaves little to the imagination.
Meanwhile Stacy has served up heaping helpings of OTT gore, courtesy the Dwarf and his retinue of equally-mutated, equally-sadistic fellows. Stacy delivers a whole freakshow of deformed creeps who either serve the Dwarf or rule the world alongside him. The Dwarf operates out of an underground missile bunker in San Antonio, and Stone is captured by the freak’s minions mere minutes after arriving in town.
Here the novel goes into its main focus: an endless barrage of Stone either being tortured or being forced to endure disgusting acts. The Dwarf plans to marry April in a perverted ceremony, and he wants Stone alive long enough to witness it. It becomes particularly grueling as Stone is treated to “dinner” in which bugs and mutated, still-living creatures are on the menu, and Stone is forced to eat his entire plate.
Stacy also delights in the freaks created by a former Nazi doctor, one who was pals with Hitler and who now works for the Dwarf, creating human-mutant hybrids. There’s a lot of stuff about the various victims of this character, in particular a hermaphrodite that has been created by anatonomical parts taken from one person and grafted onto another. All told, whole stretches of Is This The End? are very repugnant, with no light to lessen the darkness.
It’s especially galling because Martin Stone is so ineffectual in this final volume. He really doesn’t manage to do anything, and is shuffled from one captor to another. He’s even caught without a fight by the Dwarf, and so essentially for the majority of the novel Stone is either beaten, tortured, or forced to do disgusting things, all while the Dwarf triumphantly gloats. There’s also an endless part where Stone is put through “the Games,” where he must fight a three-armed mutant monster.
Stone doesn’t even manage to save himself, but only by the “surprise” appearance of a character who shows up long enough to run amock in the underground base. SPOILER ALERT: And only here, in the very final pages, does Jan Stacy deliver anything relevant; one almost gets the impression the only thing he had planned out was how to end the series, and just winged it for the majority of the book until he got there. So basically Stone hurries to save April from being raped by the Dwarf – an insane bit were the Dwarf is slowly lowered by a machine onto April’s drugged form.
But the Dwarf has sworn that if he can’t have April, the world will pay; the underground complex gives the sadist access to the Star Wars defense system (ie the satellite system proposed in the ‘80s that would house a ton of nuclear warheads), and the Dwarf, as ever managing to easily escape despite not having any limbs, scurries to the missile-firing area and punches a bunch of buttons with the stubs of his arms.
I’m still in SPOILERS here, by the way. But man, talk about a loser – Stone doesn’t even manage to kill the Dwarf! That is left to another character, one of the mutated freaks, who strangles the evil bastard. And meanwhile Stone isn’t sure if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles or not.
The finale of Is This The End? finally sees Stone and his sister April reuinited – they’ve been separated the entire series, with only infrequent and short reunions – and standing above ground as they watch the sky for the raining nukes. But Stone to the end is uncertain if the Dwarf managed to fire all of the missiles at the Earth, hence the last image we see of Stone is his looking to the sky, jumping at everything he sees, thinking it might be the nuclear missiles coming to destroy the earth. It’s interesting that the last image we see of our hero, Martin Stone, he’s afraid, and he’s praying.
But as demonstrated in the preceding pages of the book, there is no hope in the world of Jan Stacy; we cut immediately to a paragraph in which our author casually informs us that the world is turned into “glowing powder” by the raining nukes: “An intelligent species had made all the wrong choices.”
In other words, the hero did not save the day, and the Dwarf managed to destroy the entire planet. It occurred to me that Stone himself is responsible for the end of the world; the Dwarf decides to nuke the Earth in spite, because he is unable to have April. I mean, if the Dwarf had never met April, then perhaps he wouldn’t have committed such a horrific act. If Martin Stone had only heeded his father’s warning, and stayed with his mother and sister in the safety of his nuclear bunker, then not only would Stone’s mother not have been raped and killed, and his sister April not adbucted, but the friggin’ Earth itself would not have been destroyed!
So, once you take all that into consideration, it seems evident that Martin “The Last Ranger” Stone is the lamest “hero” in the entirety of men’s adventure; the dude got the entire planet destroyed.
Well, end spoilers. Overall I was happy to finally read the entirety of The Last Ranger, but the increasing nihilishm really took a lot of the fun out of it. Compare to Doomsday Warrior, where Ryder Syvertsen also clearly grew bored with everything, but at least Syvertsen delivered a series conclusion that wasn’t so dark and hopeless.
However, I’m not finished with Jan Stacy; years ago I picked up both volumes of his 1989 Body Smasher series, which is another I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; indeed, Body Smasher #1 was the last men’s adventure book I bought as a kid (well, I would’ve been 14 at the time, but still). However I’m pretty certain I was unaware at the time that the “Jan Stacy” credited for the Body Smasher books was also the “Craig Sargent” of The Last Ranger.
